Global climate change has become the imminent issue of our time. Recent literature has stressed the pressing need for adaptation planning, particularly for communities that are most vulnerable to new climatic variations, such as resource dependent and coastal communities. Yet, such cries for adaptation have often glossed over the need for prior examination into the underlying cultural mindsets of such communities. In response, this thesis has sought to examine the various factors that are influencing local understandings of global climate change by leaders in two British Columbia coastal communities, Port Alberni and the Tseshaht First Nation. Guided by a social (or ecological) constructionist lens and a phenomenological methodological approach, a series of in-depth interviews were conducted with the leadership, both formal and informal, of the two aforementioned B.C. communities during the summer of 2006. Although each community yielded distinct findings, the interviews captured richly nuanced descriptions of local environmental changes, which in turn played a sizeable role in shaping how the leaders conceptualized climate change. A plethora of place-specific historical, experiential and values-based factors interacted and moulded the many contextual culturalmodels (from tsunamis, to recycling, to colonial pasts to reverence for nature), which were imbedded within leaders' discussions of climate change. Following this core analysis, I explored the community capacity to manage and adapt to future changes by examining local strengths and challenges. The concluding chapter provided a reflection of the results and pointed to new directions.

Global climate change has become the imminent issue of our time. Recent literature has stressed the pressing need for adaptation planning, particularly for communities that are most vulnerable to new climatic variations, such as resource dependent and coastal communities. Yet, such cries for adaptation have often glossed over the need for prior examination into the underlying cultural mindsets of such communities. In response, this thesis has sought to examine the various factors that are influencing local understandings of global climate change by leaders in two British Columbia coastal communities, Port Alberni and the Tseshaht First Nation. Guided by a social (or ecological) constructionist lens and a phenomenological methodological approach, a series of in-depth interviews were conducted with the leadership, both formal and informal, of the two aforementioned B.C. communities during the summer of 2006. Although each community yielded distinct findings, the interviews captured richly nuanced descriptions of local environmental changes, which in turn played a sizeable role in shaping how the leaders conceptualized climate change. A plethora of place-specific historical, experiential and values-based factors interacted and moulded the many contextual culturalmodels (from tsunamis, to recycling, to colonial pasts to reverence for nature), which were imbedded within leaders' discussions of climate change. Following this core analysis, I explored the community capacity to manage and adapt to future changes by examining local strengths and challenges. The concluding chapter provided a reflection of the results and pointed to new directions.

Global climate change has become the imminent issue of our time. Recent literature has stressed the pressing need for adaptation planning, particularly for communities that are most vulnerable to new climatic variations, such as resource dependent and coastal communities. Yet, such cries for adaptation have often glossed over the need for prior examination into the underlying cultural mindsets of such communities. In response, this thesis has sought to examine the various factors that are influencing local understandings of global climate change by leaders in two British Columbia coastal communities, Port Alberni and the Tseshaht First Nation. Guided by a social (or ecological) constructionist lens and a phenomenological methodological approach, a series of in-depth interviews were conducted with the leadership, both formal and informal, of the two aforementioned B.C. communities during the summer of 2006. Although each community yielded distinct findings, the interviews captured richly nuanced descriptions of local environmental changes, which in turn played a sizeable role in shaping how the leaders conceptualized climate change. A plethora of place-specific historical, experiential and values-based factors interacted and moulded the many contextual culturalmodels (from tsunamis, to recycling, to colonial pasts to reverence for nature), which were imbedded within leaders' discussions of climate change. Following this core analysis, I explored the community capacity to manage and adapt to future changes by examining local strengths and challenges. The concluding chapter provided a reflection of the results and pointed to new directions. / Arts, Faculty of / Sociology, Department of / Graduate

No description available.

At the end of 8th some processes have started in Lithuania and they have been still going on. They can also called the radical transformation of polictical, economical and social system, which can also be called "a trying to transit a model of social society organization to a western type of democratic political system and market economy". The radical changes differ from so called natural changes.The radical transformations run much faster, they are usually a result of rational, planned trying to change the whole existing system or some important actions.During such a period, a demand to change the cultural models appears that have influence to an institutional organization. Culture is understood as a socially ordered, meaningful, symbolic, ritual,cultural system, wich is a guarantor of social stability.

Today, globally distributed software development is an unstoppable trend in Information Technology (IT) all over the world due to the benefits it provides such as cost benefits, time saving, accessing the large labor pool and available resources. However, globally distributed software companies face some issues in this regard. Cultural differences are introduced and discussed as one of the fundamental issues in globally distributed IT companies. Further, it is evident from the literature that business analysis process is the fundamental phase of software development process that affects the entire process of software development, and requires effective communication and collaboration among teams and between team members. Globally distributed software development makes the business analysis process and its related sub-phases even much more complicated than it is. Therefore, in this study, the influence of cultural differences on globally distributed business analysis process is analyzed. In order to do that, I conduct a qualitative study in which employees of the Turkey and Poland branches of the GTECH IT Company are interviewed. Hence, in this study remote project team member are asked about varying cultural differences that I extract from several existing cultural models and unify them into an integrated model. There are many studies exist about cultural differences in literature and these studies has similarity and differences which are creating complexity for readers and researchers. Hence, in this research Hofstede’s, Hall’s and Trompenaars’ cultural frameworks are unified and then I develop a new cultural model. By applying this new framework or model I investigated the influence of varying cultural differences on business analysis process that is conducted in a globally distributed IT company.

This study uses a discourse analysis from the perspectives of James Paul Gee (2005; 1999) in order to establish a socio-situated view of why grade 10 students often experience difficulties in representing mathematical word problems into appropriate equations and expressions that enable a solution to the problems. A discursive methodology was used to throw light on the difficulties that students experience that was different from the perspectives adopted previously, viz. from a view of the structure of the problems, from a pedagogic point of view and a cognitive understanding. An initial case study in one school in which four students were selected revealed that a master model existed that students were enacting when doing and talking about their experiences with word problems, viz. that word problems are obfuscatory. This master model rendered the students relatively mathematically helpless within a Discourse of school mathematics word problems. In order to more fully understand these findings an extended study was set up in which the methodology and analytic framework were refined. This extended study saw four students at each of three different sites selected to participate. The findings of this extended study were that the students enacting a situated Discourse model were more enabled within the Discourse of school mathematics word problems, whilst those enacting a deficit Discourse model were either peripheral or outside of that Discourse. This study contributes in that the constructs for the phenomena and the analytic tools within the context of school mathematics needed to be pioneered, adapted and refined over a period of time to address aspects particular to school mathematics. This resulted in a view from a socio-situated perspective which saw a shift in seeing what students do with the problem to what students do in the social setting associated with the problem. From this shift in focus came a new understanding of student difficulties with word problems that gave rise to a sub-Discourse within the Discourse surrounding school mathematics word problems, and students finding themselves in this sub-Discourse becoming marginalised through enacting a deficit Discourse model because they are unable to ascribe to the success model, or situated Discourse model.

Anorexia as a nosological category has developed in a western context and is now being applied to people around the world. In order for researchers to know they are asking the right questions about AN as knowledge expands, it is important to understand what meanings Anorexia carries and how those meanings manifest locally. The present study to aid in that understanding by employing a mixed methods (survey and in-depth interviewing) research approach in answering the following question: In what ways are Taiwanese students' explanatory models of anorexia nervosa (AN) congruent with or different from professional understandings derived from the western Bio-medical perspective? In answering this question, this study first addresses the current state of research on anorexia as well as the recent findings from studies done in Asia. Subsequently, the findings of the present research address what are young, Taiwanese adults' notions of the causality of AN. In particular, the present research found that student explanations of AN are focused predominantly on two causal forces; namely, the desire to be thin or the inability to eat as a result of psychosocial pressure arising from some interpersonal interactions. Additionally, Taiwanese students also maintain that AN can be explained by other less common factors. For instance, significantly more males than females believed that AN could be explained by some physiological dysfunction in the anorectic person. This study seeks to contribute to the literature by examining how college-age Taiwanese understand and conceptualize AN; which in turn may help towards understanding how other research conducted among Chinese populations has produced findings that are incongruent with the expectations suggested by the western, biomedical model of anorexia nervosa. There is further need for cross-cultural research on AN including lay understandings. This should focus not only on the "accurateness" of lay models as has been the case with the majority of research on lay models of AN in the past, but future research should consider the appropriateness of current research and public health models that influence both research and policy.

After more than twenty years of increasing understanding of the human immunodeficiency virus known as HIV, the virus continues to spread throughout the world, manifesting itself lethally in the form of the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS). With no cure or affordable treatment presently available for the majority of the people of sub-Saharan Africa and the African nation of Malawi, work aimed at preventing the spread of the virus continues to be the best strategy for lessening its impact, both at a personal level and across populations. Most people and communities in this part of the world demonstrate some understanding of HIV and its impact, and strategies such as condom use and abstinence education are familiar program interventions. However, less is known about how social and cultural processes influence personal risk taking and decision making related to HIV/AIDS. In this research, participatory research activities involving planning and producing dramas provide a venue for exploration of how rural Malawian communities can investigate and confront HIV/AIDS social causality through analyzing, planning and acting, presenting, and critiquing research. This research studies the role that shared agreement or consensus plays in developing a community's AIDS-related knowledge and in creating community-specific priorities for AIDS prevention activities. This aspect of the research is significant for applications of participatory research in community AIDS work. The research was designed so that information was collected from individuals participating in the interventions both before and after the interventions. This was intended to facilitate a better understanding of how participatory research affected group knowledge. The analytical process of Cultural Domain Analysis was used in conjunction with the non-probabilistic analytical technique of consensus modeling to gauge whether changes in agreement or consensus occurred as a result of participatory activities among intervention groups.

This thesis aims to construct a semantic system for the disparate uses of peh in TSM and peh¡¦s pragmatic functions in actual language uses in terms of cognitive accounts. Firstly, based on the data collected from dictionaries of the Ministry of Education, the present study divided the various meanings of peh into two main types, i.e., prototypical meaning and extended meanings. Prototypical meaning is further classified into perception-based type. How peh is perceived in perception-based type is in close relationship with the actual environment where we interact with. On the other hand, the main category under extended meanings is conception-based type, which is divided into four subcategories of cognitive mechanisms. That is, the diverse meanings of peh in conception-based type will be interpreted in the perspective of four subcategories of cognitive mechanisms. They are metonymic extension, metaphorical extension, the interaction of metaphor and metonymy, and culturally-related extension. Then, to better understand peh¡¦s pragmatic functions in TSM, the study shifts its foucus to the examination of the interrelationship between peh and the shared Taiwanese cultural background knowledge in actual language uses. Basically, the function which peh serves in discourse depends mainly on the context where it is used, and the world or the community will determine and pick up the most appropriate wordings for us (Mey, 2008). There is no definite answer as to which linguistic expression bears which meaning or interpretation when we try to sort out all possible interpretations and meanings for each linguistic expression containing peh. We need both contextual clues and cultural background knowledge to decipher peh¡¦s underlying meanings. The encodings of color perception do not lie in our biology; instead, it is structured socially (Lucy, 1997). In addition, certain uses of peh, e.g., pe̍h-pau (¥Õ¥]), pe̍h-thiap-á (¥Õ©«¥J), etc., in real life discourse make the function of peh more than a representation of the color itself but bridge the gap and create interpersonal relationship between their language users at the same time. On the whole, this research may shed light on the cognitive understanding of peh in TSM not only semantically but also pragmatically.